You’ve finally taken the plunge and hired a senior staff member, after years or decades of being proudly all-volunteer. Perhaps the leadership volunteers were burning out, or the organization grew too much too fast. Do you heave a sigh of relief, delegate a few tasks and carry on as before? Not if you want to keep your new paid leader you won’t!
You may already have some paid administrative help, whether staff or fee-for-service (association management firms can be a great way to transition from all-volunteer). But now you have a leader who is part of the governance function, who needs to have authority to run the organization and accountability for results.
You can’t hold someone accountable while micro-managing them!
The board meetings now need to change to a higher-level focus, providing direction, guidance and support but letting the new Executive Director (ED) decide HOW to achieve the desired results. Oh, and that means figuring out the desired results in some measurable way – you may finally develop the strategic plan you’ve needed for years.
And it’s time to establish a Governance Committee, if you don’t already have one. One of its duties would be to ensure a division between board and operational policies and procedures. You haven’t needed to think about that until now. Only the board ones come to the board for approval or amendment.
The board members will no longer be discussing issues with individual clients, workflow management, or routine event organizing (there may be an exception for galas, for example, if the board decides to lead an annual event). Once there are other staff, the board will have to remember it has only one employee, the ED. All others are the responsibility of the Executive Director – to hire, fire, manage, promote, etc., without board interference other than to operate with the law and the organizational values.
Clarity and Trust
The new ED needs clarity on their authority, such as at what dollar level a financial commitment not anticipated in the approved Budget,, or a capital purchase, needs to come to the board first. An approved job description, developed collaboratively, will go a long way towards ensuring a common understanding of their role. Performance objectives, again set with mutual agreement, and performance reviews after a probationary period then annually provide an opportunity for formal accountability.
The biggest issue, in my experience, is trusting the new ED to provide the information the board needs for its deliberations, decisions and oversight. Provided you have vetted the new hire well, with quality reference and background checks, you need to trust them until you have reason not to, with only a few exceptions. And the new ED has to trust that the board wants them to succeed and wants them to stay. The Chair normally takes lead in making sure board discussions and board members stay out of the weeds, and in good regular communications with the ED as issues arise to give guidance or clarify board direction.
The board and ED need to work together on what information the board needs, and in what format and timing. It’s up to the board to ask for additional information if it doesn’t have what it needs, but it’s also up to the board to not ask for operational details and trivial information.
Trust But Not Without Some Checks
Here are two examples:
- At this stage you don’t have a CFO and finance staff, so the Treasurer needs to stay involved well beyond just signing documents. Having continued online access to the bank statements and accounts ensures that sudden large expenditures don’t go unnoticed, for example. Division of duties applies no matter how small the organization is, and even if you have an external auditor, you can’t wait that long to find out about weaknesses in financial controls.
- Every organization needs an ethics reporting (whistleblowing) policy so staff know what kind of issues could be raised about the leader and how, along with which can’t. Human rights, harassment, discrimination, bullying, fraud, undeclared conflicts of interest in contracting out are all areas where a staff member might need to raise a concern about an ED. Other areas like work assignments, promotions, professional development opportunities and vacation scheduling are not. Any staff member raising one of those with a board member must be told to go back to the ED.
Some Directors Have Enjoyed Life in the Weeds
Some of your directors liked doing the hands-on work and managing the details. They may not be happy having to back off and focus on the strategic level at board meetings. On my first board, of a therapeutic riding centre, we had directors who were upset that they could no longer decide at the board meeting which horse would go to which farm for summer vacations! One group trying to hire me for an ED position told me I wouldn’t have the authority to rename a job position before advertising it! [I didn’t take the job.]
Some of those directors will find satisfaction by continuing with direct service volunteering but will have to remember they are not wearing their board hat while doing so. And if they offer to help the ED with certain skills or tasks, it’s entirely up to the ED whether to accept that help. Just because a director has IT skills, for example, doesn’t mean they have the IT skills the ED needs. Some will choose to leave the board, or even the organization, because they are not comfortable with the changes – providing a good opportunity to recruit new, more strategic, often more highly qualified, directors.
I’ve given some example of bumps in the road, but it is usually a road worth travelling if you want a sustainable organization. Hire carefully; ED turnover gets noticed and reflects badly on the board. If everyone is respectful of roles, responsiiblities and especially each other, the bumps will smooth over.
